No crashes for me, but I found a bug in Nexerelin 0.8.3c. Easy to replicate.
1) Pretend to invade planet with defense station
2) Change your mind and leave
3) Invade the same planet again
4) Oops? Where is the enemy army? Just a lonely station.
I think it was better before, when you invaded and had no chance to escape once the invasion started.
Thanks! Fixed for next release.
For deciding not to engage: I can see it going either way. Since there's no way to see the response fleet's composition before the dialog (and thus decide whether fighting it is a good idea), I've had complaints about unescapable surprises being sprung on the player in this way.
Maybe in the future I'll think of a more sophisticated solution.
Is it possible to declare war or do you just have to anonymously attack a faction until they declare war on you? The unprovoked rep hit seems nasty and I would rather not worry about the hoops to jump through by running around with the transponder off dodging people you don't want to kill at the moment.
Any time a patrol tries to scan you and you refuse, or if a patrol attacks you for being caught installing a comm sniffer, you won't get the warmonger penalty for the resulting hostilities. Also, hostilities resulting from agents/saboteurs being detected don't have the penalty.
If that's too much trouble, the mechanic can be turned off completely with
"warmongerPenalty": 0 in
exerelin_config.json.